Project Black Mask AdSense launched today to much hoopla, though my prediction about an early launch was wrong — in fact it launched 20 minutes late. I was able to purchase it but had to immediately run out the door to pick up my daughter and bring her to an after-school pool party, so I’ve only just now started to look at it. I will do a full review tomorrow, I think, as I’ll need to look through the advanced videos (it’s an upsell on the ebook purchase) as well.
Let’s get one thing straight: this is a book about building farms of “made for AdSense” (MFA) sites. The fundamental premise is the one that I explained in 172 AdSense Sites = $5000 per month: that if you build enough sites that make (on average) even $1/day in AdSense earnings then you’ll make a decently monthly income. Note that they can be legitimate sites — it’ll just take you a while to build that many sites.
But Black Mask AdSense is about building lots of crappy sites quickly that target long-tail search engine results. You get those sites indexed (the recommended approach is through a blog farm) and if you do it properly enough of your pages rank in the top 10 search engine results for very refined keyword searches, giving you lots of organic (natural) traffic. Put your AdSense ads strategically on the sites and you’ll have a 10% to 20% clickthrough rate and make money.
Anyhow, that’s the gist of it from what I can tell. Definitely not an approach I’d advocate most people take. There is certainly some risk involved, especially now that Google has changed its program policies to require AdSense publishers to follow Google’s landing page guidelines.
More on this later. As one of my readers told me:
Even though I’m hardly a young guy anymore…I feel like life and work is supposed to be about something a lot more substantial than such a short-sighted view. Once you start down a path like these guys have…you are forced to play this game every few weeks or months for as long as you need to make money…then you can go retire to a villa somewhere and drink pina coladas.
Something to think about!
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Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
hmm.. so, would you get a refund? Just wondering
Good question. I generally don’t ask for refunds on products that I review. I need to finish reading the book and watching the videos before deciding, though.
Hi Eric – sorry to say I bought via your link but have already requested a refund. I thought maybe I would learn something really useful, but after watching the intro videos and reading the book, I found it all too black hat and exploitive.
The part about building hundreds/thousands of Made for AdSense sites using scraped content struck me more as old hat than white/gray/black hat.
Can’t believe Google won’t close any so-called “loopholes”. The “buy viagra” example in the video seems already to have had repercussions. Now when searching that phrase in Google, first three results are still .edu sites, but not one of them redirects to online pharmacies as the video suggests was happening.
Anyway, I don’t believe the book is worth it and it certainly won’t be of value to me.
I must admit that the product’s surprised me so far. It’s not what I expected. I’m thinking refund levels will be much higher than before on this product.
Unlike the others, this one was not written by Chris McNeely. The text isn’t as interesting as the other books were.
Don’t hesitate to get a refund if you don’t like it, that’s the beauty of buying things from ClickBank… if they’re unsuitable, you get your money back with no hassle….
I would ask for a refund but the instructions regarding how to search for a niche and finding good keywords for that in an otherwise competition laden industry is the only thing holding me back at this point.
I still have another 50 pages to go but at this point, I’d have to say thumbs down so far…
I don’t find it sporting to beat up on people… and I don’t know the people behind Blackmask… so I won’t lash out at them as if I have the knowledge to do so.
But, assuming that Eric’s summary about their recommendation to build ton of MFA sites is accurate (and I didn’t wade far enough in to find that out for myself)… this is hardly a new technique. It’s been around for years… and, IMHO, bears rather little chance of success with Google on the warpath against MFA sites. I hardly think releasing a product less than 3 weeks after their MFA ban kicks in allows for accurate reflection of reality after-the-June-1st-fact.
I really believe that it’s time for publishers to behave better (not that there are not already MANY of us who try to do so). AdSense was never intended to be a game or a scam. It was designed to made advertising stupid-simple for those of us who had a hard time monetizing quality sites. To take advantage of a system like that and try to manipulate it (whether by sitting and false-clicking on ads… or by luring people to worthless sites in hope of eliciting frustration clicks) is the kind of behavior I would expect from spammers, Nigerian scammers and those who use spyware force-installs to line their pockets.
Just like email spam has robbed all of us of a great legitimate marketing opportunity and is literally costing U.S. corporations billions of dollars a year…AdSense fakirs of various stripes have caused ridiculous levels of regulation and safeguards that have hurt all legitimate webmaster-publishers.
By extension…I believe that this thumping drive to create new web sites that supposedly find and fill an open niche…but for which the webmaster has no particular interest, no qualifications and nothing to offer except for content that has been either republished from an article site, scraped from another site or created as a work for hire (and the writer’s qualification to speak on the subject is…what? and their source material is from…where?)…is not much better than the rest. The web doesn’t need more duplication of existing material.
You want to make money? Offer something that isn’t already being offered elsewhere. Or, bring together existing resources, but in a newer, more flexible, more appealing more dynamic way. THAT’s value. The rest is just…taking up space.
And…in the interest of full disclosure…I also bought the whole package, and requested a refund 10 minutes later.
Great feedback, Chuck, and as always I think you’re spot-on with your reasoning.
In terms of the AdSense part of Black Mask, I can’t say I’ve seen anything really new here. As you’ve said before, there are forum postings out there already with detailed instructions about how to create blog farms and various scraper sites. I, too, found it amusing that this product was released shortly after Google had revised its program policies to require publishers to follow the AdWords landing page quality guidelines, which I’m pretty sure sites generated by RSSGM don’t follow. Hmm, something to ask Google.
I think you’re being too hard on people who want to find good niches to write about, though. That’s no different than what people do with printed information, for example. But I agree with the part about adding value. See, for example, my post a year ago about how compilations can add value if done right.
I’m often accused of being harsh on this point…and that may be fair. Maybe the view I’ve chosen for my own personal conduct is extreme compared to others. And maybe that’s just because I have a lot of original things that interest me that allow me to provide unique value with my web sites…and thus, to do less would be inappropriate. I wouldn’t even try to defend against such an accusation, as it may well be true.
Also, I do acknowledge that most of this is a matter of personal conscience. I hate it that rules have to be implemented (rather than simply guidelines, which are less intrusive and less expensive to enforce) to address issues which we should be grappling with internally on an individual basis. But…we’ve clearly seen that there’s a huge segment of the internet marketing population that either haven’t grappled with it…or have simply caved in for the sake of money.
Honestly, I wonder how Nigerian scammers, or Adsense click teams in India, or porn/Viagra email spammers sleep at night. And there are times that I wonder the same things about these internet marketing “game players”. My full-time gig is in the world of advertising…so I am very conscious of the way words are carefully crafted…so that those who have laid out the spin can’t really be held accountable after the fact…as long as they can sleep with their own consciences.
I am ABSOLUTELY not opposed to sites that add value thru aggregation (i.e. compilation) of resources. I personally have 3 or 4 niche directories…actually, 3 are niche, and one is more general interest, but has its own unique vision…an approach that I have never seen taken before, so I thought I would try it.
I am also not opposed to using articles to bolster the content of a site. Writers exist for a reason. I believe their role needs to be honored.
HOWEVER, you use the phrase “people who want to find good niches to write about”. Is that really what’s going on? Of course it is in your case. Your original background isn’t in Adsense, but you’ve made yourself an expert, and thus, people value what you say. But…is that what’s going on in, say, an MFA site for mesothelioma (just to pick an egregious example)? I have yet to see a mesothelioma site that offers anything beyond a simple definition of the affliction and a brief summary of treatments (at best)…something which can be had just as easy by going to Wikipedia or WebMD. In fact, it’s likely that the content was scraped from one of those two to begin with (or possibly from another scraper site who stole their content from them in the first place).
Where’s the value in copying that content verbatim… or even in hiring someone from Mumbai to reword it for them and slap an author credit at the top of the page? I don’t see it.
Most countries have laws about dispensing medical diagnoses and opinion without a license. There’s a reason for that. Information, when represented as authoritative (isn’t that what a web site is?) should come from an informed, trusted, accountable source. I’m not suggesting that a mesothelioma site is illegal…but it’s certainly almost always clutter based on naked greed.
I am not opposed to article creation…even article creation for the express purpose of off-site publishing in order to increase search engine ranking. The ideal, of course, is to rank well because people have linked to you because you are of value to them. However, in a cluttered web world where it’s very difficult to be seen at all, at least the mechanism exists…so why not try to redeem it by bringing uniqueness to the process? Personally, I have started a new business to do just this. I won’t get into the specifics…but my article creation service will NOT involve stealing info from other sources, but will rather take words right from the horse’s mouth (the horse being someone who really knows what they are doing, speaking uniquely to the content of the article). So, either an approach like that, or hiring a Subject Matter Expert to do it…that’s real value. And certainly, someone writing about a subject about which they are interest and knowledgable, even if they are not anywhere close to expert status…that’s has a value of its own as well.
I stand by my call for value and uniqueness. Those are the standards by which I feel we all have a responsibility to at least evaluate our efforts before we start. What we do with those thoughts…how we implement them…is each person’s individual business. But we shouldn’t be surprised that Google hates the MFA swill that’s currently out there being recirculated in the name of “profit”, and I personally applaud their efforts to kill them off. The more successful they are in that regard, the more likely that worthwhile sites will rise to the top, and the more money reward there will be for those who do their best as a matter of conscience.
Chuck, I’m not disagreeing with you on the value side. I was just talking about how people approach content creation. I talked about this at length in Make Easy Money with Google: Using the AdSense Advertising Program, which is to find something you’re interested in as your main topic. But many people are interested in many different things, so how do you decide which topic to pursue? One way (but not the only way) is to rank them by potential profitability, i.e. which ones are more likely to make you money. Even if you don’t choose the topic itself that way, you might be interested to know what people are searching for at the subtopic level and write content that answers those problems.
Again, this is no different than what people do in real life when they go to start a business. Many people start businesses with one idea but along the way discover that there’s no market for that idea but there is a market for another, usually related, idea and that’s what they end up focusing on. Content creation is no different in that respect. Think about it, a lot of publishers publish books that they think will sell, but of course they don’t know. It’s the classic throw-it-on-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach, tried and tested by capitalists everywhere.
What surprises me is that it’s taken Google so long to go on the offensive against MFA sites.
As I think you’re aware, Eric…we’re very close on this. I just think it’s important to extend the concept of something you’re “interested in” to something you’re actually “invested in” in terms of at least beginning to acquire experience and knowledge in the subject. Someone with 100-300 sites simply cannot do this. Someone with 10-20…well, that might be humanly possible. I am also not in any way exposed to experimentation. As I said…that’s what I’m doing in several areas. But before I entered them, I had in mind a Unique Selling Proposition (what can I offer that’s different and/or better?)…which I believe is the part of the equation that so many are leaving out. I agree…I wish Google had gotten into the fray earlier. I’ve been railing on this for a long while…but at least they’ve finally arrived.
You can see a lot of people getting their adsense accounts shut down by using these “techniques”. I think the forums will soon be full of folks wondering why their account was closed. Take the time to do it the right way and you’ll have something for the future. Put up crap like this that the book suggests and you’ll soon be looking for another revenue source when Google gets hold of you.
Yes, I think there’s a real danger of that. I wouldn’t try the technique they promote without having multiple accounts.
And since you’re technically only allowed to have a single account according to the the Adsense TOS…? LOL…just feels like a bad idea all around, doesn’t it?
It’s not that big a deal. Read your copy of Uncommon AdSense — there’s a chapter in there that discusses how you can legally get multiple accounts by creating separate legal entities. I would definitely not use these techniques on my main AdSense account, that’s for sure. Well, I wouldn’t use these techniques at all….
It’s good i’ve found your site. I’m planning to order blackmask because of desperation. My site been receiving zero few days already and my ctr is 5%. You save me time of ordering and refunding. Thanks
Eric and Chuck, great discussion! The more things change, the more they stay the same: content is king.
What’s being upheld here is a basic business principle: provide value to the customer and everything else follows from that: retention, profits, referrals, and so forth. I think that’s worth remembering. I’m not saying that’s all you have to do, of course! I’m saying that this basic idea remains true. If you want to make money with AdSense, it’s all about the value you provide your “customers” in the form of content.
P.S. – I already subscribe to Eric’s blog. Now I subscribe to Chuck’s, too! Ah… the power of good comments!